


Sidrat

by rainer76



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-24
Updated: 2016-03-24
Packaged: 2018-05-28 18:55:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6341245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainer76/pseuds/rainer76
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose breathes out, the gun heavy on her shoulder. “You were going to kill him. He’s not a Time lord.”</p>
<p>“No,” the Tardis considers, and there's that discord of malice reaching through the phone. “But he is something.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sidrat

**Author's Note:**

> Right, so I've gone from writing Jessica Jones to writing Doctor Who. I have a sinking feeling it'll be Broadchurch next

On Little Milligen Street the alleyway was paved by pitted bluestone.

The buildings on either side were not ruler straight but bent – like gossiping friends - criss-crossed by washing lines and a riot of flaunted laundry. Poker dot bras, men’s jocks: socks that fled under a harsh autumn wind and tumbled toe-over-ankle down the cobbled street.   Mrs. Haversham said you could find a collection of miss-matched pairs, clogging up the drain-ways at Milligen’s end.

The buildings were bolstered by A-frame timber. Pigeons cooed in the eaves above, feathered dots below a thrashing sky. Rain was imminent.   It was said the earth was soft here, lending each residence its unique slant - others muttered it was reality that was fragile, blurring integrity into a more malleable thing.

“Zippy, yeah?” The Doctor confirmed.

“Zippy?”

“Like lime-juice, tangy on the tongue. Oh, the very air’s buzzing Rose, like a shot of electricity.”

“I’m sorry. Are we zippy, tangy, or electric? Because I’m getting confused.”

His hands were shoved deep inside his pockets, John – Tyler in this world - he gave away the surname Smith along with the Tardis, regeneration, and a host of other things, spun on his heel to face her. He paced beside Rose easily, walking backwards on the treacherous cobble. “You, wife, need to broaden your horizons.”

“Right. And you need to limit your descriptive detail. It’s taxing my brain.” Rose had a hand-hold in her grip, Torchwood designed, the light pulsing dull green as she tracked the signature on screen. “Not far now.”

“The rift was in Cardiff in the other ‘verse,” the Doctor muses. “Everything’s just a little left of centre over here, like two sets of tracing paper not properly aligned.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t make it onto the page at all.”  Rose had stopped calling her first reality ‘home’ a long time ago - since her brother was born - and for John, she supposed, home was wherever he found himself. Home was Rose, earthbound, beauty and thorns.

It was a human name he had a tendency to forget and the stars beyond his grasp. He was adaptive here, more than Rose had been when she first arrived, raging against her fate. But she would catch an expression on John’s face sometimes; a quiet yearning fit to make her skin pebble. _Do you think you’re out there?_ she’d asked once. Not the original Doctor – the one who left Wolf Bay with Donna Noble – not the man before her – born out of a metacrisis and in the midst of a bloody battle - but the Doctor who might belong to _this_ reality. To Pete’s world.

_Gallifrey might be out there,_ he’d answered slowly and then he looked at her _. No way to tell of course, and I can live without the certainty for one: but Rose, I rather like to think it **is**. _ He’d grinned at her, delighted. Rose had laughed; she couldn’t help it when he pulled that madcap expression. _Different face of course, my counterpart might even be ginger!_

“There it is,” she exclaimed now, and pointed her hand-hold toward the gutter.

He spun again, facing forward. “Oh, it’s a Xyphilian calibrator! Low energy, just enough output for your hand-hold to pick it up.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Nah. Well, dangerous to your floorboards if you dropped it... Well – “

“Doctor.”

“Flotsam and Jetsam, Rose, the rift merely spat it out.” He picked it up – the man was a protocol nightmare – and tossed it from hand to hand before lobbing it at her. “Make a good paper-weight.”

Rose caught it left-handed; the hand-hold clutched in her right, and turned it over. It looked like a river-stone to her, the grooves across the surface felt corrugated rough. It was patterned in ivory with swirls of light brown, flecks of burgundy, and was blood-hot to the touch. Not exactly a treasure for the Torchwood archives but better off the streets regardless.  Squatting in the gutter, the Doctor turned toward the end of the alley. “Do you hear that?”

“No. What?”

“Oh,” he said, faintly. Something bright, _surprised_ , ran fleeting across his face.

Alarmed, Rose turned the stone over again, suspicious it was the root of the cause - but he wasn’t paying her any mind, nor the object they’d recovered. The Doctor stumbled, uncharacteristically, and then raced down the narrow street.

“Oi!” Rose yelped, and tore after him.

Little Milligen Street ended at an English square, four alleyways that converged from opposite sides and opened into a ‘roundabout’. A small park was situated in the centre, a bench seat sat in disrepair and the poor excuse for a flowerbed was fast overgrown by weeds.

On all four sides, the residential buildings towered in Georgian white. Little squares of yellow bled out from the window-frames. A massive tree took centre stage, its leaves bare; the gnarled trunk was twisted and crusted with sap. It could be centuries old.

“What is it?” Rose gasped.

The Doctor skidded to a stop just inside the shelter of the alleyway. “I don’t - ”The bright keenness she saw earlier had faltered into confusion. The Doctor was human, human senses with a human mind, he was filled to the brim with knowledge but he had passed every medical scan Pete had insisted on. He had been on this planet for two years without a single incident beyond his absent-mindedness, but now his face was beaded with sweat, his complexion gone grey. “Oh, oh my _head_.”

Quickly, Rose scanned the surroundings again.

Park. Seat. Weeds. Flower-bed. A tree, the skeletal branches dipping outward, which her eyes slid quickly by.

There was a red telephone box on the corner of the opposite alley. A thousand windows from four different buildings, all of which faced the neglected park. Whatever was affecting him, it could come from any of those apartments. In the alley, the Doctor had called the lay-lines of the rift _zippy_ ; but Rose doesn’t get the same impression in the square. All she feels is darkness. Malevolence gathering. “John,” she said, using his human name. “Come with me.”

Rose got a shoulder under his armpit, because if proximity was making things worse there was no point loitering. His knees gave out. He mouthed, near silent. “ _Rose_.”

There was a rattling sigh, the bones of an old carcass settling as the threatened rain came down. The wind tore down the alley. The bent tree _reached_ , spindly fingers groaning under the gust. It seemed closer with its black bark; its veins of gory sap. Roses’ gaze skidded away, stumbling as the Doctor went slack.  

Startled, she yelped: “How can you be a lodestone when there’s nothing on you!” Drenched in seconds by the downpour, Rose got both arms under him; her body bent double in the alleyway. Ready to drag the Doctor by the collar if need be, her heart stutters violently when she sees the blood, running fast from his nose.

Rose wears a necklace at all times, modified from its first design. Mickey used to joke it was like wearing an egg yolk - their trans-universal hopper - large as a hand and vulgar, but the Doctor had tweaked it since. It’s little more than a pendent now, and with the walls between universes solid, it only acted as an emergency transport. It could deposit any Torchwood agent directly to medical quarantine. “God,” she whispered, with the first trace of panic, and hit the button hard.

Simultaneously, the ground erupted. Roots tore upward, through the cobbles. The twisted trunk was a sickle-curve - the lowest branches a hairsbreadth from her face - when the alleyway phased to white.

 

 

&&

 

 

“Was he hit? Attacked? Was he exposed to anything - ?”

“What district were you in - ?”

“Is there any medical history we should know about - ?”

“Was it an incursion? A threat - ?”

The questions come through the speaker like a bombardment, leap-frogging over one another for dominance. Momentarily seasick, the disorientation of the hop makes her vision blur. John’s blood is on her skin, it trickles from his ear, too.

“No,” she answers thickly. Crouched over him like a gargoyle, Rose has one hand planted against the ground to steady herself. “At least, not physically. We collected a Xyphilian calibrator but the Doct- John - said it was harmless. Um…old theatre district. Base-line human. There was something – “

There’s a Torchwood Colonel on the opposite side of the glass. A surgeon, dressed in a Chemturion suit, snaps: “Out of the way.”

The quarantine room is sealed by two bio-doors. The surgeon looks ungainly as she makes her way from antechamber to inner sanction, like an astronaut on the moon. Rose unknots her hand from John’s shirt, her knuckles gone white with tension. It’s harder to watch, to stand back and be useless.  Rose pivots: “Colonel, in the basement there’s a Tyllioa umbrella. I want it here. This room needs to be psi-protected, immediately.”

“You said he was baseline human,” the surgeon accuses.

The scale ran from zero to ten, with the majority of the human race a fat zilch: but there was the odd person here and there who hit a solid two, premonitions, or a sixth sense. In all honesty the scale wasn’t applicable to the majority of Terra Firma but a means of rating _other_ species. “He is,” Rose defends. “Just…a little more sensitive than most.”

The Colonel looks at her, mouth gone thin.

It’s not a device Rose should technically know about, but _her_ sources of information exceeded their security clearances. In the end, Rose Tyler’s still Pete’s daughter.

The colonel makes the call.

 

 

 

&&

(fifteen hour later)

 

 

 

 

“There’s localised swelling around the brain.”

“Like a concussion?”

“I suppose, in the loose sense.”

“You don’t sound sure,” Rose snaps and then bites her lip, shakes her head in remorse. “Sorry, sorry.” She hasn’t slept, outside dawn has broken, the streets washed clean, oily black, after the storm.

Doctor Sjenski rocks, a small motion coming from her heels. “Scans reveal no infection, no life-threatening trauma, John Tyler should eventually wake up. In his own time.”

“Yeah,” Rose whispers, and looks away from the Doctor. He’s too quiet in the bed, withdrawn; it reminds Rose of the first regeneration she saw. Alien, so terribly frightening in his stillness. “Did the Torchwood team check Little Milligen street?”

“Yes. Torn up cobble, park bench and flowerbed - but there was no tree. The umbrella you requested,” Sjenski adds. “You can’t run the protection indefinitely.”

“I know. Just…until he wakes up.” He wasn’t hurt physically; whatever was masquerading as the tree, it was inside the Doctor’s head, for a stint.

The pause is awkward.

Sjenski is a willowy woman with Nordic skin, pale as moonlight. Her eyes are almond shaped. She unfolds a map. “This is the square. Little Milligen street runs here, directly opposite it, on the other side of the park, is Hare’s Lane.” She points left to right, running her finger across the map. “Bailey’s Lane here. Stoll’s Folly there.”

“They named a street Stoll’s Folly?”

“All four roads converge at the park and circumnavigate around it. It could have left in any direction. Our teams did a clean sweep.”

“This isn’t Lord of the Rings.”

“Is that a river dance?” Sjenski asks, dubiously.

“Trees don’t lope through central London. Not without drawing a comment or two.” Rose bites a hangnail and flicks her eyes over to the bed. She was cleared to leave medical six hours ago. She could stay here, wants to stay here, but Rose was nineteen when she met the Doctor and he ruined her for life. She’s burning up on the inside with questions, with worry. “No harm in taking a second look.”

Rose folds the map, pockets it inside her inner jacket and turns. “Contact me,” she urges softly. “Please. If he wakes up?”

“Of course.”

 

&&

 

She takes Hare’s Lane and approaches from the opposite side.

Rose comes with the scanner, a notebook, and her BAG. _Don’t you want something a little smaller,_ the Doctor asked once. _Not a criticism because well…look at you…but you’re toting around a cannon. See! That’s never going to fit inside a pocket!_ Rose had widened her eyes, affected a pout, and slammed a cartridge home. _You don’t like it?_    He was five days old at the time and she had watched, transfixed, as John blushed.

Hare’s Lane is like a rabbit warren, oppressively narrow and long. By the time she makes it to the square the sky has gone from opaque white to a glorious blue. Picture postcard perfect, and deceptive, for it’s an autumn day with no heat. Outside, it’s still a sodding five degrees.

Her leather jacket is zipped up to the chin.

Rose hesitates as Hare’s Lane opens wide at the mouth of the roundabout. The red telephone box is beside her, Little Milligen street opposite, the ground churned up and the cobbles ruined. The earth in the park is soggy with the nights rain. “Right then,” she says to herself, and looks around at the face of the buildings. The hand hold gives off no readings. In broad daylight, the sense of malevolence has gone. Torchwood has already scoured the buildings one by one, door to door, and declared the area safe.

Rose follows the road, uneasy at the prospect of cutting through the small park, and paces the square.

There’s another telephone box at Stoll’s Folly, profanities scrawled on the walls, one window smashed in. There’s the vague silhouette of someone talking inside and Rose’s eyes drift away.

She keeps walking. She stops when she comes to the jagged gash running up Little Milligen street. Rose pauses, standing where they were last night. There’s a single drop of blood on the cobble, the rest of the evidence washed away.  “Right, four roads, one park, bench-seat, flowerbed, two telephone boxes and no tree.” She keeps her eyes fixed on John’s blood and says louder. “I’ve come across perception filters before you know!” She can’t concentrate on Stoll’s Folly, her eyes keep sliding right by, but when she chances a quick glance up there’s no one inside the telephone box, the silhouette she saw before a smokescreen. In fact, the glass itself isn’t clear but frosted over, like the privacy on a bathroom window. Rose straightens. “What, no answer?” The BAG is heavy in her arms and John might have abhorred the use of big ass guns but Rose has no hang-ups about it. “I’ll huff and I’ll puff,” she intones.

In reaction, the phone starts to ring.

 

&&

 

It’s easier now to focus on it. The shrill ring drags Roses’ eyes back every time they start to drift. She approaches warily. This close, the colour of the telephone box is arterial red, the graffiti is only partially in English: there’s hieroglyphics, mathematical equations, symbols she has no reference for. The door opens when Rose pushes her gun against it with a protesting creak.  

Inside, the appearance is ordinary, the same as any other telephone box in central London.

Rose considers for a moment, and then uses the muzzle of her weapon to unhook the cradle. There’s a crawling sensation in the back of her skull, a belief if she were to step inside, the ground would fall out from under her.

The cord has more stretch than it should. Rose balances the plastic phone on the end of her weapon and draws them both out. Feet firmly on the cobbles, she raises the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

There’s the delayed crackle of an international line then a women’s voice pipes through: “Clever. Have we met before?”

Rose’s skin pebbles - the voice changes inflection – sometimes a child’s garbled tones, sometimes a sweet melody, as if snatches of conversation were being stolen from the cellular networks and cabled together.

“No.”

“No? Ring-a-ring of Roses, a pocket full of Posies, a-tis-shoo, a-tis-shoo, we all fall _Down_.”

Rose holds the phone away from her ear, works moisture into her mouth. “You’re not making sense.”

“Neither are you. _You_ don’t belong here, Rosie-Posie with her tricks, but I see it out of the corner of my eye now, you have something of the wolf inside.” The connection crackles, the pause heavy and pregnant before the voice says slyly: “Did you lift up my skirt and take a peek? Oh, you strumpet!”

Rose’s grip tightens on the plastic. She counts down four beats until she’s certain the tirade has ended. It doesn’t sound stable. “You hurt someone last night,” she reminds. “Why?”

The question is too direct; or it doesn’t care to answer. A five year old voice rushes through the phone-line in a forlorn wail: “Do you know what I am?”

“You’re a Tardis,” Rose answers, evenly. “With a working chameleon function. You were born in the oceans of Gallifrey, you’re millennia years old, and personally, you sound stark raving mad.”

“Tar- _dis_ ,” echoes back, like the recession of a tide. “My, my, you do know a lot.”

Her blood-pressure is rising. She knows there’s a trick between listening to someone and goading them, but Rose has always been a little dodgy at seeing the distinction.

“That’s right, I do. You’re a horse without a rider.”

“Or I’m me without a flea.”

_Bitch_ is scrawled onto the wood of the front panel, carved at knife-point, the paint looks wet, shiny as an open wound. The roaring sound of static is like the tempest of a storm; all pretence of childishness abated under a budding rage: “It burned so bright like the heart of a sun. Where is he? I had my teeth at his throat but you…you tucked him away. Where, oh where could he be!”

Accident or deliberate, she can’t tell. Rose breathes out, the gun heavy on her shoulder. “He’s not a Time lord. Whatever you were doing, it was going to kill him.”

“Oh,” the Tardis says, and there’s that discord of malice, reaching through the phone: “But he _is_ something.”


End file.
